A Reader is Me

[katealaurel]

So, right after finishing my grad school apps, I decided to try to push myself to start reading more again. I've been out of the habit of reading fiction and poetry for a long time, and I don't read nearly as much academic stuff as I should.

DW has a community called

Comments

[nostalgebraist]

Have you read Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World? I enjoyed The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, but Hard-Boiled Wonderland is the only Murakami book I've read that I feel non-ambivalently positive towards.

I liked the first half of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle a lot more than the second half -- the second half just seemed too aimless to me, where the first half struck a good balance where the surreal, inconclusive events always seemed like they were working in the service of some larger whole. You could say that Murakami just isn't the sort of author from whom one can expect consistency and traditional narrative, but that idea isn't borne out by Hard-Boiled Wonderland, which had a comprehensible and mostly unambiguous plot while still being entertainingly surreal. (I think my impression of Murakami was really strongly shaped by the fact that I read Hard-Boiled Wonderland first. I didn't expect his other books to be as narratively unconventional as they were, and I was really frustrated by some of his hazier books, like Kafka

[katealaurel]

You're now the second person of my acquaintance to recommend Hard-Boiled Wonderland, so it's gone onto the to-read list.

Normally I'm a big fan of coherent narrative, but W-UBC worked for me despite the lack of resolution. That said, it didn't hit as hard as, say, The Children's Book, which did depend on a very strong traditional narrative.